EXCERPT: 'The Kids Are All Right'

Read an excerpt from Welches' new book.

ByABC News via logo
September 22, 2009, 12:09 PM

Sept. 28, 2009— -- Amanda, Liz, Dan and Diana Welch grew up in the wealthy community of Bedford, N.Y., born to glamorous, successful parents. Then, a series of devastating losses upended their lives as kids: In 1983, their oil executive father was killed in a car accident, leaving a large debt behind, and their mother died of cancer 3½ years later.

In "The Kids Are All Right: A Memoir," each describes, with humility, candor and humor, what happened next. Dan became a hellion, and was eventually kicked out of boarding school. Amanda got into drugs and dropped out of New York University. A neighbor reconsidered adopting Diana after she reached her teens. Meanwhile, Liz traveled to free herself of all of it.

CLICK HERE for the authors' Web site, and read an excerpt of the book below. Then, head to the "GMA" Library for more good reads.

This book is a true story. Or rather it is several true stories. Really, it is a collection of memories, and in the process of writing them down, and comparing them, we have learned that memory is a tricky thing. It's like returning to the house in which you lived as a child. The staircase you remembered as that monumental thing you crawled up slowly on your hands and knees is now something you can run up, hands free, two steps at a time. Well, you weren't wrong then, and you aren't wrong now. Perception may have changed, but the facts remain. Those stairs were big. Now they're small. Go figure. In the following pages, you'll see that we disagree about certain things, as most siblings do. Over the last few years of writing, researching, and interviewing lots of people, we have learned that truth is subjective, always. That goes for every character in the book. Our interpretations of other people's actions are locked in a time and a place. An eight- year- old who has lost her parents sees the world in a much different way than that same girl twenty- five years later. The same is true for a sixteen- or twenty- year- old- girl and for a fourteen- year- old boy. Some people in these pages insisted on using their real names, but other names have been changed, along with identifying characteristics, to protect people's privacy. Other than that, wehave each told the truth, and each truth is our own.

Does it feel that your life's become a catastrophe? Oh, it has to be for your to grow, boy. -"Take the Long Way Home," SUPERTRAMP

introductionOur mother died three times. We have the first death on tape,recorded the day it aired in 1976: Morgan Fairchild, wearing a trench coatand pale pink lip- gloss, shot her in the back. Over the past thirty years,we've each watched the tape several times, pulling it from dusty cardboardmoving boxes and crossing our fingers it doesn't get eaten by the VCR.It's our only copy.

The scene opens with Morgan, as Jennifer Pace, hiding in a darkenedhallway. Our mother, playing Eunice Wyatt on the soap opera Search forTomorrow, is kissing actor Val Dufour good- bye at their apartment door.His square jaw and dimpled chin are powdered an orangey tan. As JohnWyatt, Eunice's cheating husband, Val is dressed conservatively in a suit andtie, but we know him as the guy who once wore a kilt and a feather boato our parents' annual Christmas party.

The music swells. Commercial break.

Back at the apartment, our mother turns away from the camera, andthere is a loud bang. A tiny circle of dark red appears on the back of herpink satin robe. The next shot is a close- up. Our mother's face fills thescreen in a death snarl revealing upper teeth.

And so our mother's decade- long run as Eunice Gardner Twining MartinWyatt came to an end. It was her third soap gig, and her longest. Shestarted out in 1962 as Erica Brandt on Young Doctor Malone before makingher name in 1964 as the original Dr. Maggie Fielding on The Doctors.Born in 1965, Amanda is the eldest of the four Welch children. She wasintroduced to soap fans in a splashy Dialing the Daytime Stars magazine spreadas "The Baby Who Took Ann Williams off TV." We still have the article,now yellowed with age, tucked away in the same manila folder where Momstuck it more than forty years ago. When Liz was born, in 1969, Mom hadbeen playing Eunice for three years. Instead of getting written off entirely, Eunicehad a breakdown and was temporarily sent to a mental institution. ByDan's birth in 1971, Eunice was so popular that the pregnancy was writteninto the show. But Mom wasn't pregnant when Jennifer shot Eunice; rumorhad it that Mary Stuart, the show's diva and Dan's godmother, was jealous ofMom's fan mail. That's what Mom told us, anyway.

Diana was born in 1977, a year before Mom landed the role of the villainousMargo Huntington on The Edge of Night. Which brings us to ourmother's second death: Margo was bludgeoned with a fire poker off- camerain a whodunit story line that continued for weeks after her body was discovered.Margo had a lot of enemies; she was a successful businesswoman whoowned the only TV station in Monticello. Her story line involved an illegitimatechild, a sham marriage to an ex- cult leader, and pornography.

During the Margo years, as part of their after- school chores, Mom enlistedAmanda and Liz to record her episodes on our VCR, one of the first, whichwas the size of a stuffed suitcase. At night, when she came home from her dayof shooting, Mom labeled each tape with the date, show name, and episodenumber and placed it chronologically on a bookshelf in her study.

Today, only five tapes remain, the labels peeling off from the dust that hasweakened their glue, their images scratchy and worn. Amanda is the reasonwe have any tapes at all: After our mother's third and actual death, the onethat followed our father's by three and a half years, Amanda carted thosetapes around in boxes, stored them in a friend's garage, and drove themacross state lines. They have been packed up, unpacked, sent parcel post, andpopped into VCRs in New York, Virginia, and Texas. They're our familyheirlooms, a fuzzy, dusty connection to the person whom waitresses atChock full o'Nuts recognized as Eunice or Margo but whom we knew asMom. Watching them now, we see bits of our lives on the screen. The diamondring Eunice wears is really the one Dad gave Mom when he proposedin the early sixties, just a few months after meeting her. The red mugringed with fat white hearts that Margo drinks out of spent the eightiesstained with coffee in our kitchen sink at home in Bedford, New York. Theyellow organza dress that she wore to announce her engagement to the cultleader is the one that Diana wore, fifteen years later and tripping on acid, tothe junior prom. Though the ring was stolen years ago, and the mug is longgone, Amanda saved the dress, as she did the tapes, and the grandfatherclocks, and the Etruscan trunk. Like Mom, she keeps the clocks wound tochime on the hour, and she fills the trunk with sheets and blankets. And,like Mom, she saved the manila folder that holds magazine clippings documentingthe highlights of our mother's career.

"Ann Williams: 'I Relate to Children and Animals Better Than toAdults!' " shouts a bold headline across the opening spread of a 1976 articlefrom Day TV Gossip. It chronicles life at Twin Meadows, the fourteen- acre estatewhere we grew up. In it, Mom describes Amanda, then ten, as a "serioushuman being" who likes to ride her pony and wants to be an animal trainersomeday. "Lizzie," six, is a "backgammon whiz, you can't beat her!" andalso the "most giving of people," one who would gladly give up her dessertso that another child wouldn't be left wanting. Daniel, four, is a "lover" who"practices his best Clark Gable moods" on Mom. He also has a "vivid imagination"and likes to go "elephant hunting in the backyard with his Daddy,"she says. "They shoot them out of the trees." Diana wasn't born yet.

In one of the photos accompanying the article, Amanda, Liz, and Danare all piled on Mom's lap. In another, Amanda and Dan pose with theirstuffed animals. There's one of Dad, his salt- and- pepper hair elegantlyparted on the side and slicked back, like a Kennedy. He has a kind Irishface, freckled and dimpled, and smiling eyes. They described him as an investmentbanker. He was on TV with Mom only once, for a Newlywedstyledshow called Tattletales that Amanda, Liz, and Dan remember watchingwhen they were kids. Every time Dad got an answer wrong, Mom wouldswat the air, smile big, and shrug her shoulders. Diana has seen the photosomeone took of the black- and- white television set the day the show aired.Mom is sitting on Dad's lap, biting her bottom lip. He looks nervous andserious, though in real life he was neither.

Amanda has that picture in one of many family albums, glued beneatha thin plastic sheet alongside other images, proof of where we come from,of who we were before everything changed: our parents at fox hunts, regalin their red coats and top hats; childhood birthday parties with frosted cakes,lit candles, and paper hats; horse shows with ribbons and trophies; beachpicnics and Thanksgiving dinners. Amanda also has several grainy 16-millimeter home movies that Mom and Dad made, the sounds of whichhave gone wobbly and deep.

One year, as a Christmas present, Dan edited the films together and layeredsad- but- funny songs like Motley Crue's "Home Sweet Home" andElvis's "Don't Cry Daddy" on top of their slow, distorted narration. Afterfive long years apart, it was the eighth Christmas we had spent together asa family; our separation and subsequent reunion had reinforced the importanceof childhood rituals. That Christmas Eve was spent the same as theones before it: We prepared a dinner of Yorkshire pudding and roast beef,hung the four patchwork stockings that our mother had made, our nameshand- stitched in white rickrack on each cuff. We dressed the tree with oldfamily ornaments and placed the gold papier- mâché crèche at its base.Then, in keeping with another Welch tradition, we each opened one smallpresent. Amanda opened one from Dan— our new home movie.

On that Christmas Eve in 1998, we watched our father hold Amandaup in the window of their apartment in New York City so she could see theMacy's Thanksgiving Day Parade drift down Central Park West, and wewatched him hold her at her christening at St. Patrick's Cathedral, and asshe sat in his lap on her first birthday and tried to eat her card. We watchedour mother, puffy from giving birth, wave to the camera and smile, holdinga fat newborn Liz in her arms. We watched a determined Liz trompup a grassy hill in tights and fancy shoes, struggling to hold an Easter basketnearly as big as she was. We watched Amanda wave at the camera andpat Dan's back as he lay belly- down in his bassinet, her mouth formingthe words "Hi, Mom." We watched Liz help Dan take off his tiny terryclothrobe at the beach in Cape Cod before she left him sitting in the sandand ran to catch up with Amanda in the waves. We watched the three ofthem splash around in our pool, held up either by Styrofoam floaties or byMom in a bikini and a big sunhat. It wasn't until the tape finished that werealized Diana wasn't in any of those warm, sun- splattered scenes that ourparents recorded and Amanda saved and Dan edited and scored. It madesense. Those home movies recorded the idyllic times, and Diana doesn'tremember much of those.

part onespring 1982 – summer 1983

LIZI wanted to be an actress just like Mom. In the fall of 1981, I cameclose to getting the part of Jon Voight's daughter in the movie Table forFive, but then Ricky Schroeder was cast as the son. We were both blond,and the director wanted the daughter to be a brunette, so I was out. Atleast, that's how Mom explained it to me.

The following spring, I had another audition. This time, I was up forthe part of Mariel Hemingway's younger sister in Star 80. Mariel was playingDorothy Stratten, the Playboy playmate killed by her jealous husband.Mom thought I had a good chance because I looked like Mariel, sameblond hair and blue eyes, dark eyebrows, and square jaw. Even strangerstold me so. Some said I looked like Brooke Shields, but she had brownhair and brown eyes so that never made any sense to me.

Mom picked me up early from school to take me into Manhattan. Usually,her coming to get me would be an endless source of embarrassment.She'd barge into volleyball practice dressed in too- tight velour sweatpantstucked into gardening boots, her big dip sunglasses perched on top of thesilk scarf she'd wrap around her hair instead of brushing it. Worse, she'dholler "Yoo- hoo" in a falsetto across the court, waving her arms at me asif I didn't know she was there. She was impossible to miss. During thewinter months she wore a floor- length coat that looked like a skinned deadcollie turned inside out. It was mortifying.

But that afternoon, waiting in the parking lot, she looked glamorous.Her brown hair was curled under and combed into a chic bob, her gardeningoutfit replaced by a silk shirtdress and burgundy knee- high boots.This was her city outfit.

Usually Mom liked to help me prepare for my scenes during the hour longdrive into the city, but this afternoon, she had other things on hermind. "Lizzie Bits, you'll be the decoy," she said as we pulled out of FoxLane Middle School's driveway. "You'll distract your father as I set up."

She was planning a surprise party for Dad's fiftieth birthday that weekend,and she had invited old college friends from Johns Hopkins, businessassociates from Houston, Dad's brothers and sisters, as well as friends fromthe Bedford Golf and Tennis Club and the Goldens Bridge Hounds. Morethan fifty people had RSVPed, but Dad had no idea. "I'll make eggnog,"she said excitedly as we drove down Bedford's packed dirt roads lined withstone walls and ancient oaks. "We'll use the big punch bowl," she added."We'll use all the good crystal."

Mom started her cut- glass collection when she married Dad in 1964,and over the last eighteen years, she had managed to fill the shelves of thebutler pantry that lined the narrow hallway between our dining room andkitchen. She had cake plates and platters and champagne glasses, too, plusa dish designed specifically for celery and another for deviled eggs.

"I'll make lamb stew and Irish soda bread," she continued, turning ontoInterstate 684, her diamond engagement ring catching and releasing themid afternoon sun. "And an angel food cake for dessert."

Angel food cake was Dad's favorite, and mine too. For my thirteenthbirthday, only one month earlier, Mom made me an angel food cake withstrawberries and whipped cream.

She wanted me to keep Dad away from the house for three hours thatSaturday afternoon. I gazed out the window at the messy paintbrush strokeof pine trees. I needed to come up with a good plan. Dad was smart. Hepaid attention to detail. He wore pressed shirts and pants, even on weekends.Duping him would be hard.